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The Bigger They Come . . .

They come in several forms in D&D, and James describes quite a few of them in this weekâ??s Wandering Monsters. Come take a peek at which ones he covered and give us your opinion about these descriptions!

Eh. I'm not a fan of putting giants in a rigid hierarchy. For a primordial, elemental race, it's way too organized. And what does it even mean to be "higher" or "lower" in that hierarchy? On average, a cloud giant can beat a fire giant in a one-on-one duel, but that doesn't imply that fire giants are subservient to cloud giants any more than humans are subservient to bears.

With regard to the specifics of the races, I like the cloud and fire giant writeups (aside from the hierarchy bits). I could really do without the emo storm giants. The others are okay, nothing spectacular IMO.

Originally Posted by Agent Elrond

As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Baggins. It seems that you’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re Frodo Baggins, well-to-do scion of the respectable Baggins family. You smoke pipe-weed, you celebrate your uncle’s birthday, and you help teach your gardener’s son his letters.

The other life is lived in the Wild, where you go by the adventurer alias "Underhill" and carry the most powerful relic of evil we have a name for.

Pretty positive. I certainly recognize the giants in that. Not nearly as controversial as the Minotaur.

These line up about with what I expect, and they also have a nice tether. I like the idea of "ancient giants" as a unified culture, and it goes well with the mythological link to Titans. It also makes it easy for them to work together: rather than have six disperate kinds of monsters, you might have a Cloud Giant who lives at the top of a volcanic mountain with a glacier, and marshals Fire and Frost giants under her reign, while Stone giants might be mercenary recruits and Hill Giants serve as the front-line brutes and a reclusive Storm Giant in the clouds above the peak may be a potential ally for the party. So you can use a lot of different giants, rather than using six different flavors of Fire Giant.

I'm a little eyebrow-raising about the link to FR. The more I see those words dropped, the more I'm thinking 5e's "example setting" might be FR. Which I guess is fine, since FR IS pretty generic D&D (leaving Greyhawk for the more pulpy Sword-and-Sorcery sandbox style, and Dragonlance for the more story-oriented "Fantasy Opera" style), but if that is the case, it's something I'd be a little peery of. Not a bad idea, just keeps me a little suspicious.

Nothing terribly surprising. Honestly, the best part was the Forgotten Realms lore. I'm not a Realms fan, so at least that was new to me and I wouldn't terribly mind some of that being included in the MM.